What Happened to Goodbye(38)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“I know!” Opal buried her head in her hands. “She makes me nuts. Plus, she’s, like, incredibly good at spinning. I don’t even know how I got into this! All I wanted was parking.”

We both just looked at her. Downstairs, my dad was yelling again.

“Well,” I said, after she’d been in this position, like an ostrich, for a good fifteen seconds, “parking is important.”

“It’s like, I know what I want to say to her,” Opal said, dropping her hand. “I plan to be professional and prepared. But when the actual moment comes . . . it’s not so simple. You know what I mean?”

Just then, the door banged open again downstairs. “Mclean?” my dad called up. “You needed to talk to me?”

Hearing this, I felt my own heart jump, remembering the real reason I was there. I looked at Opal, then answered both her question and my dad’s with the same answer. “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

Ever since the divorce, and my ensuing epiphany that I did in fact have a choice and an opinion concerning it, I’d justified every bit of my anger toward my mom simply because of how she’d wrecked my dad. Cheating on a man with someone he greatly admired, in the public forum, and then leaving him for said person while his own life crumbles into pieces? Even now, just thinking about it never failed to get me mad all over again.

I couldn’t keep people from talking about my mom and Peter Hamilton on the street or at Mariposa, couldn’t go back in time and change what she’d done. But I could run interference with the morning paper, carefully taking out the sports section and chucking it into the recycling before he woke up in the morning. I could refuse to talk to my mom on the phone in his presence, and never put up any of the framed pictures of her and Peter and the twins she kept giving me for my room at home and then rooms, plural, everywhere since. I could talk about the past, our past, as little as possible, avoiding the entire subject of my first fifteen years in conversation whenever I could. He wasn’t looking back, so I did my best not to either.

But occasionally, this was not an option. Like, say, today, when in two hours I’d be sitting right behind the coach of the number-three-ranked college basketball team, on national TV. After two years of keeping everything possibly hurtful away from him, I was about to hand him a grenade. It was no wonder that as I walked over to meet him at a table by the window ten minutes later, I literally felt sick.

“So,” he said, once I sat down. Across the restaurant, Opal was at the bar, washing glasses and talking to Tracey, who was dusting the plant I’d noticed was so dirty on our first visit here, what seemed like ages ago. “What’s the verdict on lunch? I can probably get away for a full hour. We can really go crazy.”

I smiled, feeling even worse. The truth was, the last place my dad needed to be on a busy game day was anywhere but the kitchen here, and we both knew it. But he felt bad about canceling on me, and was trying to compensate. That made two of us.

“Um,” I said, glancing over at Opal, who was wiping down the bar, the cloth in her hand making smooth, big circles across its surface. “Actually . . . I sort of have plans this afternoon.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, maybe we’ll shoot for breakfast tomorrow or—”

“With Mom,” I blurted out. It wasn’t pretty, these two words just falling from my mouth and landing like dead weight between us. Then, since I was already in it, I added, “She’s coming down with Peter for the game and wants to see me.”

“Oh,” my dad said, and it was amazing to me how this, the same word he’d just spoken, one syllable, two letters, could sound so totally different. “Right. Of course.”

Over at the bar, Opal was restocking glasses, the sounds of happy clinking drifting over to us. Everyone was bustling around, the energy building. They were opening in ten minutes.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to. But things have been pretty strained since the move, and Peter asked me to do this. I just didn’t think I could blow it off.”

“Mclean,” he said.

“I mean, I could blow it off,” I continued, “of course, but they’re probably already on the way here and will freak out, and I know you don’t need that. . . .”

“Mclean,” he repeated, stopping me from going further, although I had no idea what I was planning to say. Something equally lame, I was sure. “You’re supposed to want to see your mom.”

“I know. But—”

“So you don’t have to apologize to me for that,” he continued. “Ever. Right?”

“I feel so bad, though,” I told him.

“Why?”

He was watching me, really wanting to know. Oh, God, I thought, swallowing hard. This was exactly the conversation I did not want to have. “What she did,” I said, starting shakily. “To you. It was really, really awful. And it feels disloyal to act like it wasn’t.”

It was horrible, talking about this. Worse than horrible. I felt like I was chewing thumbtacks, with each word another spoonful forced in. No wonder I’d taken such pains to avoid it.

There was a clang from the kitchen, followed by someone letting loose with a string of curses. But my dad kept his eyes on me, for once not distracted. “What happened between me and your mother,” he said slowly, taking his time, “was just that: between us. Our relationships with you are separate things entirely. Being with your mom isn’t an insult to me, or vice wa. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded, looking down at the table. Of course I knew this: it was, after all, my mother’s party line, as well. But in the real world, you couldn’t really just split a family down the middle, mom on one side, dad the other, with the child divided equally between. It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again. It was what you couldn’t see, those tiniest of pieces, that were lost in the severing, and their absence kept everything from being complete.

“I just hate that it’s like this,” I said softly. I looked up at him. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re not,” he said. “You couldn’t. Okay?”

I nodded, and he reached over, taking my hand and squeezing it. And this simple connection, reminding me of the one between us, made me feel better than any words he’d said so far.